Flora Tristan

FLORA TRISTAN, pen name of Flore-Celestine
-Therèse-Henriette Tristan-Moscoso, Married name CHAZAL
(legally changed to Tristan after separation in 1838), Born in
Paris on April 7, 1803; died in Bordeaux on November 14, 1844.
Even though Flora Tristan did not live to see 1848, her radical
ideas and her personal involvement in French workers' struggles
for social justice were a small but significant element in the
groundswell of leftist criticism that undermined the legitimacy
of the conservative Orleanist regime during the 1840s. Known to
her contemporaries as the writer of travel memoirs, a utopian
novel, and assorted social commentary, Tristan is now recognized
as a thinker whose works bridged the gap between "utopian" and
"scientific" socialism and helped lay the foundations for modern
feminist theory. Tristan was heavily influenced by the
utopian-socialist thinkers of her day, but she diverged from the
Saint-Simonians and the Fourierists in important particulars.
Rejecting the idea that class harmony could be effected through
the good offices of an enlightened middle class, she posited the
existence of a fundamental class antagonism and addressed herself
directly to the workers, telling them that they alone could best
represent their own interests. Tristan's feminism complemented
her socialism. Whereas earlier French feminists had discussed
sexual inequality in isolation, Tristan argued that the
oppression of women was directly related to the oppression of the
working class. Her attempts to analyze the relationship between
the subordinate status of women and the economic inequalities of
the class system led her to articulate what the American
historian S. Joan Moon has called a "utopian synthesis" of
feminism and socialism. Like the Fourierists, Tristan believed
that social progress could be measured by the status of women,
and that the emancipation of the workers went hand in hand with
the emancipation of women. In 1843 Tristan left her home in
Paris and embarked on a Tour de France intended to
promote the ideas contained in her final work, L'Union
Ouvrière (The Workers' Union). Travelling from city
to city, Tristan met with groups of activist workers and
attempted to interest them in her plan for a national Workers'
Union. She urged these workers to break down the occupational,
regional, and ideological barriers that divided them from other
laboring men and women, and she encouraged them to seek strength
in national, and international, worker solidarity. Tristan's
sudden death in 1844 cut short her involvement in the social
reform movement that culminated in 1848, but her writings and her
personal contact with provincial artisans left their mark on
subsequent developments. Immediately after her death, several of
her followers, inspired by her vision of national worker
solidarity, attempted to implement plans for a Workers' Union,
with minimal success. However, the most dramatic expression of
Tristan's lasting impact on the French labor movement was the
1845 strike at the Toulon arsenal. According to the French
historian Maurice Agulhon, Tristan's visit to this city during
her Tour de France radicalized its workers and
helped to precipitate this important strike. Tristan's ideas and
her personal dedication to the workers' cause were not forgotten
in 1848. French workers' expressed their enduring gratitude by
placing a monument on her tomb in October of 1848. In a show of
solidarity that would have greatly pleased Tristan, almost eight
thousand workers commemorated the occasion by marching to her
grave singing a song from The Workers' Union. While early
historians of French socialism sometimes focused more on
Tristan's eventful personal life than on her intellectual efforts
or activism, she has come to be more fully appreciated in recent
years. A number of articles and books have analyzed her
contribution to French feminism and social theory, while several
of her own works have been reprinted in French and in
translation.
Kathleen M. Nilan